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Post by dmundt on Jul 17, 2008 15:48:58 GMT -4
Oh my God! The last 10% of a story questions whether the strategy is correct!! How dare they!!?? And after only spending the other 90% gleefully repeating what the government claimed. How can a journalist possibly question the government's strategy!!!
You forgot to mention that this is from an obscure organization and the author is: Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder Pretty weak when you have to go that far down the ladder.
Slate.
The Guardian.
How dare they cover protestors. And how dare they report that the protestors were appalled by shock and awe??!!
And that's from MTV, of all places.
You're not getting it. You've listed mostly obscure non-news organizations.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 17, 2008 15:49:17 GMT -4
The immediate aftermath of "Shock and Awe" recieved nothing but negative coverage, though it had succeeded in breaking Iraqi command links and in making the ground campaign considerably easier.
Even Stars and Stripes was criticizing it!
“The air campaign that the Pentagon promised would ‘shock and awe’ Saddam Hussein’s government appears to have done neither,” said Michael Gordon in the New York Times. Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, a frequent critic of airpower, told the New York Times on March 26, “The main thing we’ve learned from this is that ‘Shock and Awe’ hasn’t panned out. The targeting hasn’t broken the back of the leadership.”
US Plan To Convince Iraqis To Surrender En Masse Has Flopped,” Atlanta Journal–Constitution, March 22. “Allies Prewar Assumptions Fall Short as Iraq Resistance Stiffens,” USA Today, March 25. “War Could Last Months, Officers Say,” Washington Post, March 27. “Too Little Shock, Not Enough Awe,” Los Angeles Times, March 30. “No Shock, No Awe: It Never Happened,” WorldNetDaily.com, April 3.
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Post by dmundt on Jul 17, 2008 16:25:42 GMT -4
As an aside, I really wish you hadn't picked "shock and awe" as something to argue about. It has become so ingrained in the lexicon that it is hard to find a combination of search terms to eliminate all the false hits.
You do have to remember that expectations for "Shock and Awe" were set very, very high. Harlan Ullman, the guy who came up with the idea, said: "We want them to quit, not to fight, so that you have this simultaneous effect - rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima - not taking days or weeks but minutes."
And Pentagon officials said "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
Other statements like this were made, but it's hard to sort through all the chaff.
I think there was an impression that the whole thing might be over in days. When that didn't happen, you'd kind of expect the media to come out and ask why it hadn't happened.
And none of this is about questioning whether the war was necessary, which is what the media should have been doing.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 17, 2008 17:27:31 GMT -4
You're not getting it. You've listed mostly obscure non-news organizations. The claim was that "shock and awe" received negative press before it went off. I've provided multiple examples when all I really needed was one. CBS is obviously the most major one. Point proven.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 17, 2008 17:29:14 GMT -4
As an aside, I really wish you hadn't picked "shock and awe" as something to argue about. It has become so ingrained in the lexicon that it is hard to find a combination of search terms to eliminate all the false hits. Yeah, it's proving quite difficult. So, have I proved my point that at least some of the press criticized the administration's war strategy before it happened?
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Post by Retrograde on Jul 17, 2008 20:02:16 GMT -4
GDP and deficits are not an indicator of how the debt is to be paid. They tell me the statement "We didn't put World War II onto our kids' credit cards" is false. I did do the math. That's why I know the statement about the second world war is false. I suspect that if you had done the math, you wouldn't have made the statement in the first place. But that is an untested hypothesis... My point about the tax rates in World War II was to point out that the generation of WW II largely paid for that debt and that they were willing to do so. You may believe this if you like; the evidence does not allow me to believe it. The evidence tells me that during the second world war years, the US government spent about $2.37 for every one dollar it took in revenues. As the US government ran only a few small surpluses in a few years since the second world war, most of the debt from that time still hasn't been paid off.
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Post by dmundt on Jul 18, 2008 10:34:51 GMT -4
Yeah. I was totally wrong. Should have done my research first. I had it in my head that we hadn't started incurring debt until the 1970s. Boy was I wrong. Thanks for doing the math.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 18, 2008 15:42:47 GMT -4
Yeah. I was totally wrong. Should have done my research first. Was that so hard? Now why can't you do that when I'm the one calling you on something? Like when you said that Christianity had set medicine back a thousand years by burning witches at the stake?
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Post by dmundt on Jul 18, 2008 17:50:36 GMT -4
Well, first, you can't burn witches if witches don't exist. Second, we never really had that conversation -- you just told me I was wrong and then we never came back to it.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 18, 2008 17:52:44 GMT -4
Well, first, you can't burn witches if witches don't exist. Second, we never really had that conversation -- you just told me I was wrong and then we never came back to it. I thought you didn't want to come back to it because you were embarassed at having made such a ridiculous claim.
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Post by dmundt on Jul 18, 2008 18:17:04 GMT -4
No, not at all. The more general claim is that Christianity set the world back about a thousand years. More specific to the issue above was that women with what amounted to medical knowledge during those days would often be killed for practicing witchcraft. There is pretty compelling evidence that the image we have today of the old witch dates to those times and that it is a distortion of an old woman making herbal remedies.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 18, 2008 19:59:06 GMT -4
Well if you want to discuss it then open up a new thread. I still think it's completely ridiculous.
EDIT: In fact, after a little more thought, I think you would have to show the following to prove your case: 1a) That a large number of women were burned at the stake as witches for practicing what we today would recognize as herbal remedies or other medical techniques. Names, dates, and places of execution would be nice. 1b) Or, alternately, that Christians engaged in widespread threats of an accusation of witchcraft against any woman who practiced herbal remedies or other medical techniques. Letters between church leaders or recorded sermons against herbal remedies would be adequate, but they must be shown to have circulated throughout Christendom. 2) That the techniques known by these conjectural women victims were 1,000 years ahead of their time. That is, that the techniques they knew were not improved on until 1,000 years after their lifespan. Of course, that makes the window for finding cases rather narrow - from around AD 34 to AD 850 or so. Details of what they knew would have to be from near-contemporary accounts.
So good luck with that.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 25, 2008 17:13:45 GMT -4
Remember the satirical cover of the New Yorker mentioned earlier in this thread? It appears that those the cover was satirizing - Republicans - actually liked it much better than Democrats. This poll shows that 2 out of 3 Democrats thought it was inappropriate, while 2 out of 3 Republicans thought it was okay. As I said earlier, Democrats seem to not have a sense of humor about Obama, even when the joke is mocking Republican's supposed view of him.
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Post by dmundt on Jul 29, 2008 18:20:15 GMT -4
According to The Center for Media and Public Affairs, a very conservative media watchdog group: Since the primaries ended, on-air evaluations of Barack Obama have been 72% negative (vs. 28% positive). That’s worse than John McCain’s coverage, which has been 57% negative (vs. 43% positive) during the same time period.There's your liberal media for you. www.cmpa.com/Studies/Election08/election%20news%207_29_08.htm
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Jul 30, 2008 11:05:49 GMT -4
I'm very surprised if that is accurate, since I remember reading an article with exactly the opposite conclusion the other day. Pitty I can't find it again at the moment. It would be nice if it were true - buyer's remorse, perhaps?
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